The Quiet Son

The fact that Vincent Lindon won Venice’s Best Actor award for his performance in it – over Adrien Brody’s phenomenal tour de force in The Brutalist – should be reason enough to make people curious about French drama Jouer avec le feu. Co-directed by sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, the feature delves into the lives of a working class family, driven apart by the eldest son’s (played by Benjamin Voisin) falling in with right-wing extremists.

Apart from its international title, The Quiet Son shares further similarities with a film that premiered at the festival two years ago: Florian Zeller’s The Son. Both set up a father-son relationship at the core of their story, but end up defining everything through the father’s point of view. With little actual insight into the titular characters, these films stay on the surface level of the problems they depict, rather than dive into its deep end. Reactions were mixed at Zeller’s decision to do so, and fascism is not an illness the way depression is. As such, one is left wondering why the Coulins are barely interested in what led to the son’s radicalisation (beyond his search for comradeship) or the gradual development thereof.

The audience finds out about his political convictions when Lindon’s character does – at which point it is already too late. But like in The Son, the depicted parental misconduct serves as manifestation of an alarm bell, meant to screech at its viewers to recognise the problem and hopefully take the lesson learned from it into real life. Here, the approach proves successful: in its immediacy of cause and effect, the situation is tangible, where an intellectualised debate on the dangers of subscribing to ideology would likely feel too abstract to have an impact.

Without Lindon, it is unlikely the feature would come together the way it does. Even as the characters still seem somewhat underdeveloped, the French legend brings such heart to the figure he portrays, it is impossible not to be moved by his inability to get through to his child.

Jouer avec le feu is a necessary film that provides no answers, but should effectively work to sensibilise parents to intervene the minute they spot these warning signs in their own family.

Selina Sondermann

Read more reviews from our Venice Film Festival coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Venice Film Festival website here.

Watch a clip from The Quiet Son here: